iason is in Athens and says:"Hi! Welcome to inquiry(?), my online portfolio."

How to Preserve an Event?

impulse

A Reconstruction project for Pyramiden, SvarbardCompetition_02/2015

While attempting to evaluate what out of the existing corpus of buildings
should be preserved and passed down to the next generations, our team realized
that the most seductive component of this land is the fact that humans have
left. In their absence, the site is allowed to return to its prior state.
Here, the decision that led to this promising reality is the only meaningful
past: The momentum of people leaving Pyramiden was to be preserved. The
sentiment that once accompanied this event is now to be repeated countless
times, through a linear journey towards the sea. Its sequences of views and
experiences “constructs” an collective reflection on our actions and their
impact. This is the legacy that Pyramiden has to offer in view of the challenges
that the Arctic zone will face in the years to come.

In collaboration with K. E. Papasimakis

Can We Marry Heritage and Innovation?

flow

A Cultural Center at the Tower of LondonCompetition, 04/2014

In the Tower of London common memory, contemporary city, river
Thames and public space create a continuum. The intervention is
conceived as a passage from the city to its roots: A thin surface,
curved by the necessity to facilitate the access to the Tower,
sets a new frame to admire the monument through an intimate public
space. Its floor’s design interprets the link between the city’s
rapidly changing skyline and the water, an element of primal
importance for the Tower’s perception, as the moat is completely
re-filled with it. Crossing the almost hidden entrances, visitors
find themselves in the internal core of the building, where the
structure of the ceiling offers an exceptional interplay of light
and shadow. Here, the most valuable artifacts are exhibited next
to modern creations, while the institution finally meets the 21st
century museum standards.

How to Combine Maximum Desires and Maximum Density?

EgoCity

multi-user real-time video gamesAcademic, 01/2015

EgoCity, instead of juxtaposing
"average" individual "dreams",
proposes a new urban model
whose primal matter is its citizens'
most crazy fantasies. It is
a project that goes far beyond
a theatre of formal architectural
folies and aspires to construct, in
urbanised and dense conditions,
a participative dream, a living
mosaic that contains an unlimited
amount of desired situations. In
order to achieve that, rather than
focusing on an aesthetic result,
a particular interest has been
manifested in the development of
an appropriate gaming process
that would be capable of taking
advantage of every player's selfishness
and then transform it into
a spatial potential. We consider
that this constant emergence
of unexpected typologies can
be proven a vehicle of crucial
interest towards an authentically
human-driven architecture.

When does Banality become Exceptional?

stimuli

An Event Laboratory in Coney IslandAcademic, 07/2015

According to Rem Koolhaas, Coney Island is the laboratory of the
Technology of the Fantastic. The intervention (essentially an act
of transplantation) takes advantage of this rich heritage by
reproducing a distorted version of the facades' sequence, once found
in the iconic Amusement Parks. Having discarded the program itself,
the essential for the interaction is left: a plan as a simple trace in
the ground and a decorated two-dimensional surface associated to it.
The project gradually metabolizes the brutal urban transitions by
submitting the environment in a new logical luckiness: The old separations
are replaced by zones of “contaminated space”, with a radically new
organization, even if none of its existing functions is altered.
However, this intervention remains an ephemeral and fragile gesture. The
people of Coney Island are free to choose their way of appropriation,
generating an infinite number of possible scenarios. Only one of them
is depicted here.

In collaboration with L. Dugal

Is the Banlieues’ Residential Tower up to Date?

sole

The vivid debate over the construction of singular high-rise
buildings in Paris found a new reference on a socially “sensible”
neighborhood, strategically placed in the middle of a discontinuous
urban fabric, itself being a palimpsest of medieval, industrial
traces and “Grands Ensembles”. That context was seen as an ideal
chance to experiment on densification by making use of a basic
modernist (“blameworthy”) toolbox, intending to combine the benefits
of the vertical and the horizontal city, both found in scattered
fragments in situ. In order to propose that living on and next to
an “object” (the tower), can be equally sustainable, a complex
built ensemble was created by juxtaposing a variety of housing
typologies, while coherence has been ensured by the collective
courtyards. Being open to their urban environment and the nearby
inhabitants, they set a new frame of a non-isolated domestic
modus vivendi, based on social mixity.

What Future For an Unsuccessful Business District of The 70s

multiple

A Cultural Port in Rive Gauche, ParisAcademic_06/2014

The idea of creating a passenger harbor in Paris Rive Gauche
takes into consideration the important role that this district
is expected to have in the following years, as Grand Paris comes
to life. Having in mind this metropolitan scale, the project
functions as the centerpiece of an extended cultural network
of “transportable events” which takes advantage of the potential
redevelopment of the Seine ports. In the scale of the neighborhood,
the project reorganizes the logistic flows around an interchange
of combined transports (bateaubus, RER,subway). Instead of
simplistically “building” around the hub of a district saturated
by the “objects” of the past, the scheme proposes to unite and
multiply the existing experiences, using as a vehicle an impressive
structural system inspired by harbor’s cranes. The base of the
project, with its cultural facilities and restaurants is open to
all, while the mass of the108 housing units invites residents
and visitors to discover their own district through its terraces,
inner roads and panoramic walks.